Museum

MASS MoCAis an oasis of contemporary art that turns into a full-blown, non-stop picking party during the festival. Every corner and causeway of the museum’s 16-acre campus comes alive with fiddlers, mandolinists, flat pickers, and singers playing pop-up shows and jamming with fellow festival-goers. It’s a music, art, and nature lover’s paradise.

VISUAL ARTS
MASS MoCA exhibits art by both well-known and emerging artists, focusing on large-scale, immersive installations that would be impossible to realize in conventional museums. The broad-shouldered, raw industrial character of our soaring galleries (with 110,000 square feet of open and often naturally lit space) has proven both inspiring and liberating to artists. The opening of our Phase III renovations in May 2017 will more than double our gallery footprint.

PERFORMING ARTS
MASS MoCA presents more than 75 performances year-round, including contemporary dance, large rock concerts, world music dance parties, indie-rock, progressive bluegrass, outdoor silent films with live music, documentaries, and avant-garde theater. Indeed, the word “museum” in our name is misleading because 50% of MASS MoCA’s programmatic resources, staffing, and emotional bandwidth is devoted to the performing arts, and our commitment extends to hosting work-in-progress showings, residency workshops, and support of experimental R&D.

“Where else can you spend a weekend listening to neo-trad bluegrass, hiking the Appalachian Trail, and wandering through a 19th-century electrical factory filled with paintings by Sol LeWitt? Nowhere but MASS MoCA, which happens to be the hippest performance space north of New York City.” — Acoustic Guitar